Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Parenting and Advocacy How long to get an appointment where you are?

Just because I'm curious, and I suspect that my locale may be an outlier.


If you have (or know of others who have) gotten your child to visit a therapist or counselor, how long was your wait for an appointment? I mean for an initial appointment.

From phone call of inquiry to going to an exploratory/initial appointment-- what was that elapsed time? Is it typical, or was it much longer/shorter than the local norm?

TIA.

(As for what it is here, I'd rather not say until I have a few responses from others.)

It has been a few years, but I want to say it was about a month for a child's apt with a therapist.

Depends on the clinic. At some, you can get an intake appointment in under a month, while other clinics have a waiting list of 3-6 months. If your PCP sends a pre-approval, you may get an earlier appointment than if you just walk in. Unless you threaten harm to yourself or others while you're in the clinic, of course.

I am familiar only with appointment by the primary physician's referral - when they do that, they categorize the referral with a priority code - it can range from same day appointment depending on urgency to a wait of 2-3 weeks. If the physician (or pediatrician) feels the situation demands it, it is possible to get a same day or next day referral for appointment.

Depends on the therapist/counselor and if they have an opening. When I was calling around last summer, some well recommended therapists had no openings and couldn't tell you when they would be available. Others it would take weeks to get an appointment. We ended up doing the testing with someone who could work with our schedule last summer, and we lucked out that that the psychologist DS was recommended happened to have openings in her schedule when I was looking.

It all depends on WHO you want. If you want someone who everyone recommends it could be months.

I should clarify-- this is for counseling/treatment, NOT for testing/evaluation with a neuropsych/evaluator (the latter seems faster).

With the situation that ashley references-- that is, with a referral. The bad news is that the referring professional just handed DD a list of providers and apparently told her to start cold-calling. (Yeah, really.)

We seem to have a situation much like that described by bluemagic.

I've tried this now on three different occasions, and in each of them, the waits for "urgent" patients (that is, those who have significant risk factors for a psych hold if they don't get help/resolution) seems to STILL be some 6-12 weeks out, if you can get someone to even tell you if they've got openings.

Calling in the first week in April, the answers were:

a) no openings until late June. Oh, no-- we won't see a person like that after all.

b) we'll call you back in May.

c) we'll call you back. Sometime.

d) how does July sound?

e) We don't have any openings.

f) leave a message.

g) An urgent appointment? Well, maybe we could get you on our cancellation list, with the understanding that you might still be waiting until June-- there are others on that list, too. What is your schedule like on Tues/Thurs between 10 and 4, anyway?

h) We don't see adolescent patients anymore.

i) We can put you down and if the doctor has any openings before the end of summer, he'll call you.

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(These are for INTAKE appointments, mind.)

That's awful. I assume that she is having issues that need attention now. Is there anything available through the university?

For us, one of our kids was having issues near the end of last school year (maybe April?). We were willing to wait for the provider that came most highly recommended for the issue that we were hoping to address. The provider called us back within a few days and told us that we would have to wait until some other patients finished up, probably some time in the summer. We had our intake in June.

Universities may talk a great line to parents and prospective students about the availability of wonderful mental health resources, but what they mostly mean is inspirational webinars about how to get along with your roommate, and easy prescriptions for Adderall or Xanax (or both!!) over at student health.

Frankly, given what we've seen, college suicide rates make MUCH more sense to me now. For all of the hand-wringing of administrators, and the appointment of more people to "examine" the problem, there is actually some erosion in on-the-ground support for students, as compared to a couple of decades back, from what I've seen.

They offer NOTHING in terms of talk-therapy in-house. They also aren't offering referrals-- more like a strong recommendation to "get professional help with that," and a list of local providers. The result is what I listed above.

Sorry if I sound a little bitter. The thing is, colleges and universities are GREAT at patting themselves on the back for all that they are doing for "student mental health intervention/prevention/awareness," but-- well, let's just say that they're doing just as great a job at this as they have sexual assault interventions over the past few decades.

I find the hypocrisy of it pretty galling.

Sorry, HK. That does sound incredibly frustrating.

Any kind of initial specialist appointment can take months here, especially if the doctor has a great reputation. We have only gotten around waiting many times when we have a doctor who spoke directly with the specialist and he/she has more than a passing acquaintance. Sometimes another way around is paying in cash.